Are you looking for a cheap, cheerful and high impact way to add some instant curb appeal to the front of your house this season? We love this idea — reader MidCenturyThriftyGal shows us how she used our favorite mid century paint collection to transform her plain garage door into a cheery mid century modern garage door.
MidCenturyThrifty Gal didn’t need to buy a new garage door to get the modern garage door design she wanted. Instead, she used her existing garage door … chose two colors from the Sherwin Williams Suburban Modern paint collection that complemented the red-gold color of the brick on her house… and then painted out some of the existing rectangles on the garage door to create a mid century modern geometric design. The colors she chose are Caribbean Coral and Harvest Gold. It is amazing what a little paint can do to add retro appeal to an otherwise plain garage door. Kudos to you MidCenturyThriftyGal — on a job well done — and thanks for allowing us to share this photo of your freshly-painted garage door.
Also check out this six-page catalog (page shown above) that we featured in 2010 — it shows lots of ways to add wood trim to great terrific mid century modern garage door styles.
Guy H. says
Wow! I am so glad I saw this. I am planning on painting my garage soon. I was going to go plain white. I have to say I hadn’t even considered any color at all!
Now I have new paint to buy!
Mary Elizabeth says
Actually, if you look at the Crawford sample colors, the second row, second from the left looks very similar, except that there are two doors and the windows take up a whole row instead of two panels. 🙂 M.E.
siri says
thank you so much for that suggestion, mary elizabeth. sometimes i don’t know how to connect what i’m looking at with verbal descriptions. (probably why i flunked gym!) very helpful to steer me back to crawford.
this is a great thread, all.
Mary Elizabeth says
Hi, Siri,
I have taken photos of the garage doors and will send them to Pam as soon as my techie DH gets home. Then she can post them here or not. Not sure how to post photos here directly.
siri says
love love love what you did! i have to tell you that when we were about to paint our garage door i kept showing our painter the “crawford” sampler…and we kept driving around a large spanse of houses in our area, and didn’t find ONE garage painted with such joy. (we had seen many in an area of upstate NY where we rented several years ago… ellenville NY especially)…. anyway, we wound up painting our garage the same color as the house, a wonderful slate grey…but my heart sings when i see MCTG’s door! good for you (and your lucky neighbors)!!!
Sherree says
Thank you Siri ! It was a bit of a leap, as my Hubby was a little skeptical. But we love the results. We ended up painting our front door Caribbean Coral also 🙂
Maude says
I have been wanting to do something with my garage door for years and this is really inspiring. Mine is plain white and totally boring. Patterns like these would be beautiful.
Maude
Sherree says
Thank you Kate and Pam for showing my garage door! Hopefully it will now inspire my mid century dwelling neighbors to move on from plain white.
Kate says
Thanks for letting us feature it. 🙂 You did a great job MidCenturyThriftyGal!
J D Log says
This post is timely I am on holidays at the moment painting my garage. It is set back from the street behind large gates although you can still see it as I am on a hill. I have painted the facia boards black gloss the eves pink the walls a light green (all vintage tinted colours).
I got the oversize double garage door made out of plywood so I will be painting a triangular abstract pattern on the door. There was a house with that pattern about 20 mins away has since sold don’t know if doors have been painted over. Always take photos of interesting houses as the ideas are handy and can be used in your own home. I am lucky there is no homeowners association otherwise I would be run out of the neighbourhood. Most of my neighbours are pretty good.
AtomicLivinHome says
What a fab idea,MidCenturyThriftyGal!! Kudos to you!
Robin ~
Sherree says
Thank you 🙂
Peg says
My mom painted our kitchen cabinets those colors in the late ’60s (top pic). Still one of my favorite color combinations that reminds me of sitting in the breakfast nook and coloring while mom made dinner.
Elisa says
We painted our garage door based upon seeing the first flyer in one of Pam’s earlier posts. Our garage is detached and set back off the street and our house is red brick. We went with the second row, second from the left–white trim grey panels. Looks great!